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Link building is not only an important part of search engine optimization, but can drive traffic directly your web pages. Every link should be judged by its own merits – for example, if a link uses a nofollow tag then it will not benefit SEO, but if it drives large amounts of traffic then it is still a beneficial link. Conversely, a search engine friendly link from a relevant and highly ranked page that drives no traffic to your site is still of benefit to your SEO efforts.

Search Engine Friendly Links

A search engine friendly link is one that will gain you the most benefit in search engine optimisation. If you rely on natural linking, without undertaking any specific link building projects then you will have no control over whether a link carries any advantage in your search engine optimization.

Enabling Spiders To Follow Links

Always ensure that spiders are able to crawl, or follow a link. A robots text file can be added to a domain that is used to prevent spiders from following links to specific domains, from certain pages, or over the entire site. The link code itself can also contain a nofollow or noindex tag that prevents search engines from following or indexing a link respectively. In SEO terms, this makes the link useless. Check that none of these exist on a site or page that you are trying to gain a link from.

A Varied SEO Link Profile

The best link profile is one that contains a wide range of sites and uses a range of your primary keywords. Recent indications have shown that some search engines also place weight on semantically related keywords in a bid to try and promote organic search engine optimisation so include these keywords in your SEO efforts.

Anchor Text And Keywords

The anchor text of a link is the section that visitors can see when looking at a page. This is also the search term that search engine spiders will rank the resulting page for. As such, while it does pay to have a handful of links using your domain as the visible section of a link, it is better practice to use keywords as anchor text. The more links you receive, and the higher those links are valued, the better you will perform for the keywords that are used.

Offering Link Code On Your Website

If you do rely solely on organic link building through posting high quality content, known as linkbait, you can still make some efforts to ensure that the links you receive are of higher value. Offer HTML code on each page that you would like others to use when linking to you. Also give the page a title that includes one or more of your primary keywords but still makes sense. And, of course, if your homepage is being used for this purpose then a keyword rich domain name and website title will go a long way.

SEO And Link Building

Links are the currency of the Internet, although their resale cash value has been diminished in some respects. Building links using keywords as anchor text and getting those links on highly regarded websites that do not employ noindex or nofollow tags is a major part of any effective search engine optimisation campaign. Building links will be one part of your SEO campaign that needs to be continually performed in order to keep making the most of your search engine traffic

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